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je vous passe ce long mais interessant message. Désolée, c'est en vo.<br>qu'en pensez-vous ?<br>amitiés, claire Panier-Alix<br>____________<br>Class based on 'Lord of the Rings' languages helps give a weighty college <br>ý <br>ý <br>ý01/26/2003 <br>ý <br>By LINDA K. WERTHEIMER / The Dallas Morning News <br>AUSTIN - The University of Texas students scribbled their names in a strange <br>language. The A's looked like F's, the P's resembled gibberish. <br>They were in their second day of learning Old English runes, the writing <br>system used by author J.R.R. Tolkien to invent the languages Elvish, Orcish <br>and Dwarvish for The Lord of the Rings.ý<br>ý <br>ý <br>At UT, the tongues revived by the hit film trilogy are being used to teach <br>the millennial generation this semester. Already, students are raving about <br>the new course, titled "The Linguistics of Tolkien's Middle Earth." Both <br>sections of the class are full, and hundreds of students are on waiting <br>lists to get in.ý<br>ý <br>ý <br>ý"So far, I love it. I like the visual, seeing the runes on the board," <br>said Elizabeth Nelson, a 19-year-old UT senior who has three fairy tattoos. <br>A tattoo of the Lady Galadriel is on her midriff. "I like being able to say <br>that I know how to write my name in runes. Lots of my friends are jealous." <br>ý <br>Fred Hoyt lectures during his "Linguistics of Tolkien's Middle Earth" class <br>at the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Hoyt hopes the course will inspire <br>students to study linguistics.ý<br>ý <br>ý(HA LAM / Special to DMN)ý<br>ý <br>UT isn't alone in jumping on the Tolkien bandwagon. This fall, three <br>Dallas-area universities will team up to teach a literature class about <br>the trilogy for students from the University of Dallas in Irving, Southern <br>Methodist University and the University of Texas at Dallas. <br>The trend isn't new. For at least two decades, some professors have taught <br>popular culture classes about film and TV shows and at times faced ridicule <br>from colleagues. The difference now is that more professors are unabashedly <br>linking movies and books their students adore with traditional, often <br>weighty subjects, from physics to philosophy. Pop culture is no longer <br>viewed as a nonsensical subject.ý<br>ý <br>ý <br>The idea of connecting traditional classes and popular culture grew rapidly <br>the last five years, said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor <br>of media and popular culture. Textbooks such as The Simpsons and Philosophy: <br>The D'oh! of Homer and Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything <br>and Nothing helped move the trend along, he said.ý<br>ý <br>ý <br>ý"College students know an enormous amount about television, about popular <br>music," Dr. Thompson said. "If we can use that knowledge to invite them <br>into other kinds of work, it'd be silly not to."ý<br>ý <br>ý <br>But professors can't simply show film clips and play sound bites of popular <br>music. <br>ý"If you're trying to teach Plato using Seinfeld and Simpson, that's a fine <br>thing to do," he said. "But if you never get around to reading Plato, you've <br>failed." <br>ý <br>At Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., students have been <br>able to sign up for "Beam me up, Einstein: Physics through Star Trek" since <br>ý1997. Don Spector teaches the course every other year for nonscience majors. <br>Dr. Spector shows bits of Star Trek episodes based on whether there's a <br>physics principle he can teach. Students, for example, watch a clip about <br>a cloaking device. (Translation for nongeeks: a gadget that renders objects, <br>typically spaceships, invisible and undetectable.) Then the class talks <br>about what principles could be used to create the device. <br>ý"I have fun with it. I like teaching in this way better probably because <br>they are more engaged with it," Dr. Spector said. "Physics always has this <br>reputation of being so hard and so out there. It helps the physics to bring <br>something that's so accessible." Lyrical literature <br>David Gaines, chairman of the English department at Southwestern University <br>in Georgetown, Texas, teaches a literature class based on Bob Dylan. <br>ý"It's not, 'Let's just listen to "Tangled Up in Blue" 70 times and go home <br>and listen to it more,' " Dr. Gaines said. "It's a way to engage students <br>with materials they're interested in and urge them to take that a little <br>further." <br>Using the work of Tolkien as the focus for linguistics makes perfect sense, <br>he said. The students think critically about a book they have read for <br>pleasure in the past.ý<br>ý <br>ý <br>The three Dallas-area schools teaming up for the class this fall will link <br>the Tolkien trilogy to religion, medieval philosophy and other areas, said <br>Dennis Kratz, a UTD professor and dean who will help teach the course. <br>ý"What's really happening today is the old notions of pop culture and high <br>culture, except for the extremes, have blurred," Dr. Kratz said. "When <br>you redo La Bohéme as Rent, is that high culture or middle-brow culture?" <br>ý <br>The Lord of the Rings is a bit of both, he said. <br>ý"I just think it's such a very deep, satisfying, intellectually pleasing <br>work of literature, and yet it's fun," Dr. Kratz said. <br>UT instructor Fred Hoyt, a graduate student, created the Tolkien course <br>to meet a requirement that he create an introductory linguistics class. Both <br>sections of his classes, one with 30 students, one with 70, filled <br>immediately; he would have been able to fill each class 10 times over, <br>based on waiting lists.ý<br>ý <br>ý <br>Linguistics link Mr. Hoyt said there's a logical connection between the famous ýauthor and linguistics. Mr. Tolkien was a linguist before he was a novelist. One ýof the required texts in the new UT class is The Languages of Tolkien's Middle <br>Earth, another author's interpretation of the invented tongues. Mr. Tolkien <br>based the languages on Old Norse, Old English, Gothic, Welsh and Finnish. <br>ý <br>Mr. Hoyt, like many of his students, began reading the author's books as <br>a child. He said the work gave him a love for new languages, though he didn't <br>know about linguistics at the time.ý<br>ý <br>ý"Part of the reason I wanted to offer this course was when I was an <br>undergraduate, I wish I had known about linguistics," he said. "In my <br>department, there's more focus on teaching. Linguistics is hard. It's more <br>like we're realizing we always could've gotten to more people." <br>His hope is that some students will want to study the discipline after <br>taking his class.ý<br>ý <br>ý <br>ý"It's not about the movies. The stuff we're interested in is the stuff <br>left out in the movies," he said.ý<br>ý <br>ý <br>Students must read The Lord of the Rings and familiarize themselves with <br>the appendix that explains the development of the languages. They'll study <br>Old English runes, but they'll also learn Angerthas Daeron, the Elvish runes <br>that Mr. Tolkien created, and Angerthas Moria, the Dwarvish runes. <br>They'll talk about how Elvish sounds melodic and the Black Speech in the <br>trilogy sounds harsh. "The good guys in his book speak beautiful languages, and ýthe bad guys speak ugly languages," Mr. Hoyt said. <br>Students said professors are right to find ways to connect teaching to <br>students' lives.ý<br>ý <br>ý <br>ý"If it's interesting and relevant, you'll learn it better," said Alex <br>Hancock, a junior. Professors, even when they include popular film or books, ýare careful to teach in depth, said UT senior Travis Lara. <br>ý"It's not more bells and whistles," he said. "It's more involvement with <br>students." Eric Lee, an engineering major, never intended to study linguistics ýuntil he saw "Middle Earth" in the course title. <br>ý <br>ý"I saw it advertised on the front page of the UT Web site," Mr. Lee said. <br>ý"I was like, 'Cool. I have to take this class.' "ý<br>
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